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Climategate: Dud

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Traitors? Fraudsters? Hank, I’m surprised at you. One would think the CRU scientists had been caught red-handed indeed. And yet to date there’s no evidence of fraud at all (“Town Dandy,” Dec. 17)

The two most hyped examples of alleged fraud (out of thousands of e-mails over years of time) are the code for a chart that calls for a significant artificial adjustment, and the “trick” to hide a decline shown by tree ring data that did not match instrumental data. Neither example has panned out as anything even nearing scientific fraud.

The adjusted chart data was not used. The published version of the chart used the unaltered data. Furthermore, the paper it was used in was specifically discussing the apparent unreliability of tree-ring data.

The “trick” to hide the decline was to leave off just the tail end of one (out of many) sets of tree ring data that, as the original researchers themselves noted back when the study was first published, they did not trust.

To date, none of this information is controversial. The problems with the tree ring data has been know for over a decade. No one anywhere has been able to show any fraud in any published report as a result of these e-mails. The CRU group’s data and results line up well with the same from numerous other labs around the world. The data is sound.